Recently we posted a blog about proactive legal services and why businesses should be using them. It’s a cheaper, faster and a more efficient way for businesses to handle legal issues. It’s about avoiding and addressing legal issues and risks before they become full blown disputes or court battles.
While the previous post explained in more detail what proactive legal services are and the benefits to business owners, we thought it might be a good idea to provide some actual examples of how it works.
Business Formation (Corporations, LLC’s, Partnerships)
- Choosing the proper business entity is an important decision. Being proactive when making this decision is an easy way to minimize potential liability for business owners personally. Planning this in advance will allow you to get the right structure, set up all the necessary corporate documents and get an up front awareness of corporate governance so you can properly manage the business set up over time. This will allow owners to address potential issues upfront, and they can be worked out in advance, so if they ever come up there is already a process to address them. The alternative is not to set up your business formation documents at all, it’s very common, which may leave the business owners open to personal liability and major issues down the road.
Contracts
- Contracts are a great area where proactive legal services can be beneficial to business owners, especially small business owners. Contract law and best practices are routinely changing and something that needs to be monitored and addressed in real time, otherwise you may be setting yourself up for some serious contract issues when it comes to enforcement or potential disputes. From a proactive standpoint, you can get contracts set up in the proper way from the start, and then put in place a contract management system that allows your businesses contract process to be more efficient and faster, which will also save you company money. Failing to do this may cause serious issues down the road. Your contracts need to be enforceable and structured as a way to avoid disputes. This saves you time and the risk of losing clients, suppliers or vendors over contract issues.
Intellectual Property
- Every business has some sort of intellectual property and it is important that it is protected. Whether it is trademarks, patents, copyrights or trade secrets, there are ways to address any potential issues and manage those valuable assets as the business grows. You can put in place a process for identifying and protecting intellectual property and making sure you aren’t infringing on anyone else's rights with what you are creating. Again, you can identify potential issues upfront, plan for them and in many cases avoid them entirely with proactive legal services. The alternative is that your own intellectual property becomes vulnerable or you run into issues where you are infringing on someone else's intellectual property and find yourself facing a lawsuit.
Employees
- Employee issues are a big risk for businesses, and can create a lot of headaches for business owners. Regulations and laws around what you can and can’t do vary from state to state and are also governed by the federal government. While it is probably not possible to remove all the risks associated with employees, you can certainly put in place policies and procedures that will address the common issues and have a process to identify risks early on so they can be addressed before they become a full blown dispute or lawsuit. This can be done upfront before you bring on any employees and then managed over time to take into account changing regulations or potential issues that come up in your specific business. Failing to do this will result in wasted time and energy because you’re going to constantly be addressing issues that come up with employee management, not to mention employees pose a big risk for lawsuits if you’re not careful, and those lawsuits are expensive.
Independent Contractors
- A lot of businesses are using independent contractors in some form or another. Federal and state governments are very interested in whether or not a business is properly classifying a worker as an independent contractor. Failing to do so can lead to a business having to pay back taxes, wages, benefits, deal with class action lawsuits and potential major reputational damage. This can be avoided though, you can set up a way to manage your independent contractors and adjust accordingly to any changes that might impact that. Addressing those potential risks upfront and continuing to do so seriously limits the risks associated with using independent contractors. Failing to do so would leave your business exposed to expensive audits from departments of labor and lawsuits that will waste valuable time and money.
These are just a few examples of how proactive legal services can benefit businesses and minimize risk. There are many other ways they are favorable. It’s important for businesses to think about addressing issues early on, or before they even arise. Many businesses don’t think about using legal services in this way, but it’s very beneficial and can keep you out of major legal trouble down the road. Proactive law will have a direct impact on your businesses bottom line. Not to mention, you can know upfront what legal services are going to cost, so you can budget accordingly.
Launch developed its innovative approach to providing legal services as a way for small and medium sized businesses to take full advantage of proactive lawyering. Working with a lawyer early on can help business owners avoid common issues and build a strong foundation. Contact us to learn more and get a free consultation.